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Tuesday, October 30, 2018

It appeared that Bill Doolan’s death was a suicide. He was
dying of cancer. He had just gotten word from his doctor that he could expect
to live about three more months, and they would be filled with pain. And so,
Doolan put his affairs in order: he even called a cemetery and bought a plot
there. Then, while listening to music in the dark, he shot himself.

The medical examiner, the cops, the next of kin... everyone agreed this must be what
happened. Everyone, that is except Mike Hammer, who has spent a year away in
Florida, trying to keep a low profile after having gunned down Sal Bonetti, the
sadistic son of a notorious gangster. Mike can’t shake the feeling that
something is off, and so he begins a separate investigation into the death of
his former mentor. Before long, the corpses begin piling up as Mike Hammer
makes his grand return to the streets of New York, dispensing his particular brand
of violent justice…

Monday, July 31, 2017

I have never been very good at approaching my reading
systematically. I will pick up whatever the heck I want to read, whenever I
want to (or am able to). Thus, a look at my to-be-read pile will reveal a
mish-mash of genres, authors, and page counts. Some books are barely longer
than 150 pages, others are well over 1000. Dante’s Divine Comedy is palling around with a bunch of Rex Stout’s Nero
Wolfe novels, and my Paul Halter omnibus can be found next to a Latin edition
of Winnie the Pooh. Sometimes, I pick
up a book that is extremely long, and then it takes me a long time to finish
it. Which means that the review takes a long time to go up. Hence the delay since
my last review. With this word of explanation, I’d like to begin talking about
Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

But before I do, let me answer the objection: “This is a
crime fiction blog! What on earth are you doing reviewing a fantasy novel?” My answer is this: I
have no answer for you. Technically, you could
consider this a mystery novel – there is a mystery that is solved at a certain
point in the novel – but I wouldn’t recommend approaching it as such. The
reason I picked up this book is tangentially related to crime fiction – Bryan Fuller’s
next project after the fantastic TV series Hannibalwas a television adaptation of American
Gods. I was intrigued by the description, and the book landed on my
to-be-read pile. I felt like picking this book up a few weeks ago, so I did.

Monday, July 03, 2017

John Baird caught sight of a book and it captured his
attention. On the cover was an old photograph of a street from a bygone era,
but for some reason, the photograph haunted him. Desperate for answers, John
even allowed himself to be hypnotized by a local shop owner to try and get to
the bottom of the mystery. His obsession with the photograph begins to distress
his new wife Andrea, who is equally puzzled by her husband’s reticence to
discuss his London job – he disappears for the day and says nothing about where
he was or what he did...

Meanwhile, Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst are
hunting a serial killer known as the Acid Bath Murderer, and before long the
two plot threads collide, along with a third thread taking place in Victorian
London. There are even two impossibilities at work: first, a clairvoyant sends
his own death prediction to himself, only to be found murdered in a locked
room. Second, a man disappears without trace from a room that is under observation
from all sides.

Friday, June 16, 2017

Mrs. Wentworth came to see Father Bredder with a very
disturbing story. She was terrified of being murdered – burned to death – by her
husband. She told him of the time her mattress was soaked in gasoline, and
other mysterious incidents. She’s even heard her husband’s voice telling her that
she must be burned! But how could this be possible? Mrs. Wentworth’s husband, a
dentist, has been dead for two months, having died in a traffic accident!

Father Bredder doesn’t brush off Mrs. Wentworth’s story,
though – he has a nasty feeling of having spotted Satan’s hand at work in this
situation, and he enlists the help of Lieutenant Louis Minardi of the Los
Angeles police to investigate Mrs. Wentworth’s story. When the case turns
deadly, Father Bredder must investigate who made A Pact with Satan, selling their soul to the Evil One by committing
murder…

Wednesday, June 07, 2017

Set in the world of the theatre, Derek Smith’s Come to Paddington Fair brings back Algy
Lawrence as well as his policeman sidekick, Chief Inspector Steve Castle, from Whistle up the Devil. Their involvement
in the story begins innocuously enough, as Castle has received a pair of
tickets to the theatre. But included with the tickets was a mysterious message
that simply reads: “Come to Paddington Fair.” The meaning of the message is not
immediately apparent, but its sinister undertones become quite clear when the
play’s leading lady is killed onstage, during a climactic scene in which her
character was shot.

Fortunately, with two detectives in the audience, the
investigation is poised to begin on the right foot, and indeed, a suspect is
apprehended almost immediately! But, as the investigation proceeds, suspect
after suspect is cleared, and it slowly begins to appear impossible for anyone
to have committed the crime! Thus, Come
to Paddington Fair establishes itself firmly as a sort of spiritual sequel
to Whistle up the Devil. Instead of a
conventional locked room mystery, Smith gives his readers an impossible crime
in the vein of “nobody could have committed
the murder… and yet it happened!”

Sunday, May 28, 2017

Introduction: Goodness
me, it has been a very long time since I last reviewed a book, not since
late August of 2015!! Unfortunately, the demands on my time during the school
year have made reading fiction nearly impossible. Indeed, during the 2016-17
academic year, as I ended up writing over 160 pages worth of essays, I was only
able to read one work of fiction – Shusaku Endo’s Silence – but it was a book I felt I should not
review on the blog. Now that summer is upon us, I can take a deep breath, step
back from academia, and read a little bit more fiction. So I decided to treat
myself with some mysteries. My reviewing may be a little rusty, so I please ask
you to forgive me in advance.

* * * * * * *

As Alice Arisugawa’s The
Moai Island Puzzle begins, we are introduced to a group of students at
Kyoto University who are on their way to Kashikijima Island in order to solve a
puzzle leading to hidden treasure. One of these students is the author, Alice
Arisugawa, who along with his friend Mr. Egami is heading to the island on the
invitation of their friend Maria. (Alice, by the way, is a male name here.) Maria’s
grandfather, Tetsunosuke Arima, hid a collection of diamonds somewhere on the island,
but neglected to tell anyone the location of the treasure before dying. All
that is known is that the moai
statues all over the island, inspired by the Easter Island statues, are the key
to solving the puzzle.

It doesn’t take long for the murders to begin, as two bodies
are discovered. The victims were shot, but the rifle used is nowhere in the
room, and all potential exits (the window and the only door) were locked. More
mysterious events occur, and it is up to Mr. Egami to solve the puzzle, with
Alice acting as his Watson.

Monday, May 30, 2016

When I checked in on the blog today, I discovered that the view counter was well over 1 million visitors! This is despite the fact that I haven't posted anything at all recently, focusing instead on my studies.

I would like to take this moment to thank all of you, the readers, for your support. This blog would not be possible without you and your support! At the Scene of the Crime is not going anywhere for now.

This milestone has gotten me to reflect on how much I have changed along with the blog. When I started this blog back in 2011, I was a very different person. Although I had originally conceived of the blog as mainly GAD oriented, discovering authors such as William L. DeAndrea, Bill Pronzini, Paul Doherty, and Paul Halter helped to broaden my horizons into more contemporary mysteries as well.

However, my reading had to be put on hold extensively when I entered the seminary in 2014. My studies are very important to me, and consequently I'd find myself reading Winnie Ille Pu for entertainment (AND Latin instruction) instead of, say, the latest Nameless Detective novel. If it is any consolation, this focus on my studies has resulted in me receiving an academic award for my performance in the final year of my philosophy program.

Though my activity levels on this blog have dropped significantly, I'm glad to see that people still read my material, and I hope that it has been found useful, informative, or perchance even entertaining. I hope you continue to read and enjoy this blog, and I will continue to maintain the blog, even if I my posting is erratic and sporadic. (That being said, I do hope to have a review in the next week or so.) [edit (May 2017): Yeah, that review sadly never happened...]

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

(Note: An abridged version of
this essay first appeared in the magazine Gilbert several years ago.)

When it debuted in 2002, Without A Trace (WAT)was a highly
entertaining and well-acted drama about a fictional FBI Missing Persons Unit.
In its second season, the series matured brilliantly into one of the best
series on television. The dynamism that propelled the freshman and sophomore
years dulled a bit in the still-often-decent third and fourth seasons, but
midway through the fourth season, the clever plotting and subtle character
development began a slow and heartbreaking disintegration. Despite occasional
brief resurgences, by the time WAT
was cancelled after its seventh season, it was an emaciated shadow of its
former self, yet it always could have easily returned to greatness.

Wednesday, September 02, 2015

Patrick: When I first
heard about Hannibal, my instinct was
to roll my eyes and turn the other way. Really? Yet another Hannibal Lecter
prequel? Hadn't we learned our lesson from the horrendous HannibalRising? And
starring Mads Mikkelsen as Lecter? There's no way it could possibly work, I
thought to myself. It would probably just glorify Lecter's killing sprees as he
killed people, and fans would eat up the violence and consider Lecter a hero.
So I went on my merry little way, discarding Hannibal into the same trash heap into which I mentally relegated
shows like Breaking Bad and Dexter.

Of course, then I actually watched Breaking Bad and Dexter,
and I learned that the fans who admired the protagonists from those shows were
wrong to do so. Breaking Bad deals
with the complete moral breakdown of Walter White, whose downfall is a direct
result of his pride and greed. As for Dexter Morgan, he is an unreliable
narrator who lies to himself and to the audience about his feelings - he calls
himself a sociopath because it is easier than examining his choices and
questioning the "code" given to him by his adoptive father Harry,
surely one of the worst father figures in all of television.

As I was watching these shows, Chris Chan and I would
discuss them and how my views about these shows were evolving. And almost
inevitably, the subject of Hannibal
came up. Chris highly recommended the show to me, and because I trust his
opinions, I sat down and watched it.

Hannibal begins
with Will Graham tracking down a serial killer named Garrett Jacob Hobbs, who
kills young female college students. As part of his investigation, Graham is
brought into contact with Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who manipulates events behind
the scenes to engineer a confrontation between Graham and Hobbs. Will kills
Hobbs in order to save an innocent life, but the event is traumatic, and so he
turns to Dr. Lecter as his therapist.

Throughout the first season of the show, Hannibal treats
Will as a human Petri dish, conducting experiment after experiment to see how
Will will react in a certain situation. This results in Will progressively
losing his grip on reality— part of his brilliance as an investigator is his
uncanny ability to visualize the crimes from the killer's perspective, but as
the series progresses it becomes clear that this "talent" has serious
consequences on Will's sanity.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

It’s September 1901, and the small village of Cleverley is
gripped with panic. It started with children telling wildly improbable stories –
a sinister face pressed against a window, a man appearing out of nowhere from a
mysterious greenish fog, a sinister figure seen near a cemetery undoing the
knots on a piece of string… But when a young girl narrowly escapes a vicious
assault, the villagers gather at the cemetery and make a shocking discovery. One
of the family crypts has been left wide open, and two of the coffins inside
have been vandalized. The corpses inside have been impaled through the heart
with a wooden stake… and although both have been dead for many years, one of
the bodies looks like it has been dead for only a few weeks.

The two vandalized corpses are the two deceased wives of a
Russian count, the subject of many a malicious rumour in the village. It is
said that his wives, before their deaths, developed a taste for human blood,
and one of them even was implicated in the death of a child. And wife number 3
is looking alarmingly pale lately… and has taken to wearing a scarf around her
neck.

Never fear, for Owen Burns is nearby. He is investigating
the death of a Catholic priest, whose last act was to hear a dying man’s
Mysterious Last Confession. He makes a connection to an unsolved murder case
which took place in a locked-room. Before long, a similar locked-room murder takes
place, sending Owen Burns and his partner-in-crime, Achilles Stock, to
Cleverley. There, they discover that the main suspect in the locked-room
mystery is our friend the Russian count… an alleged vampire!